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SBL is an IT and Business Process Management (BPM) company offering smart solutions to organizations across geographies and industry verticals.We offer a range of customized services
and solutions that allow our customers to reduce operational costs.

In April 2015, The National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, UK, will throw its doors open to tens of thousands of family history enthusiasts. In keeping with our long history of transcribing billions of old genealogical records, SBL’s UK team will be attending.

The event – enticingly named ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ after the ever-popular BBC TV series – brings together all elements of the Genealogy family tree. These range from large Genealogy search companies such as Find My Past, through to archive organisations like The National Archives, through to the general public who are simply there to research their ancestors. Such is the popularity of this annual event that it runs for 3 full days.

Of course one of the reasons why SBL attend is our close affinity with the Genealogy sector. This is in part an emotional connection, as we have been responsible for indexing and transcribing a very significant part of the historical records currently available, and not just in the UK. So when you next look at an old parish record, or census return, or schools register, or Birth, Marriage & Death certificate, there is a very high chance that we will have been involved in transforming the old paper document into a searchable image or database.

If you would like to discuss our Genealogy Services then please don’t hesitate to contact us. It is also worth remembering that many of the skills required for indexing and transcription – fast and accurate data handling, high levels of concentration, unerring attention to detail, well established QA & QC processes (we are ISO Accredited) – are transferrable to other sectors. For instance we already provide similar data processing and management services to Insurance Companies, Banks, Accountancy Practices, Retail and Legal.

In a stirring ‘call to action’ speech towards the end of 2014, Prime Minister Modi outlined his ambitious vision for a Digital India. It quickly became clear that the successful implementation of this vision would rely primarily on the implementation of IT & Technology innovations across public and private sectors. In particular, a key starting point would be initiating the change from paper-based information silos to paperless and evolving data ecosystems.

At SBL, this announcement was met with great enthusiasm. As a leading IT solution provider in e-Governance projects, and a long-standing advocate of digital transformation in India, it felt as though our own strategy was finally aligning with central government policy. Most impressive of all was the understanding that a successful digital transformation has a number of vital stages, all of which must be joined up through a comprehensive and coherent plan.

Our successful track record in implementing e-Governance solutions demonstrates that we have the required understanding and project capabilities to formulate and execute these often complex plans. Part of this is of course carefully implemented change management. We have already helped a range of organizations to navigate this transformation. These include Government departments, Legislative Assemblies, Publishing companies, Libraries and Commercial enterprises. Typical project activities include digitizing and archiving existing paper records; inter-active database creation; hosting and joined up management of data; e-portal creation to deliver digitized records online.

A clipping mask service is a process of making the layers of an image transparent so that it can be finely edited.

Making the pixels transparent
Creating layers
Perfecting outlines
Adding backgrounds
Removing wrinkles
Adding people into the picture
Creating multiple cutting paths from the same image
Age reduction look

Planimetrically accurate images are a necessary pre requisite for any mapping projects. Accurate maps are a basic necessity of the developmental projects like, infrastructure development, mining, master planning, precision agriculture etc. Orthorectification is a process by which a raw image is transformed into a planimetrically accurate image. Often georeferencing is used in synonym with the orthorectification. But in true sense, through georeferencing only x, y corrections and transformation is dealt with while ortho rectification will do a correction on relief displacement caused due to elevations of the objects within the map. So orthorectification is considered as most accurate process by which an image is brought to the real world coordinates by considering correction in all three directions of x, y and z.

Orthorectification is the process of eliminating the relief displacement due to sensor mal functioning, height of the terrain, earth rotation, panoramic distortions etc. The outcome of the orthorectification is a planimetrically true image. It also brings uniformity in scale throughout the image. SBL has the capability to do the orthorectification to a wide variety of images such as satellite images, aerial photographs and UAV images.

Orthorectification can be done in a variety of software. SBL uses ortho master module of Inpho for the aerial photographs and satellite images and PIX4D for UAV images. The process involves importing of the image, DEM, external and internal parameterization files in to the model. Parametric approach can be followed in the model where internal and external correction files in the form of GCP files and RPC files are involved. At this step desired projection can also applied in the model. Back ward projection can be applied in the process. The object space X, Y coordinates related to every pixel of the final ortho image is determined. The height Z at a specific X, Y point will be calculated from the DEM or the 3D model and then the X, Y, Z object space coordinates are projected in the original image in order to acquire the gray level value for the ortho image pixel. Interpolation or re-sampling process in the original image is also essential because of the fact that the projected coordinates will not fit accurately at the original image pixel centers. Output cell size and extent will be defined at this step. Output file type can also be specified at this step. Error calculation is generally derived in the form of RMSE report.

Quality assessment of the orthorectified images is one of the activities which SBL perform to ensure highest standard of the output images. Pan sharpening, mosaicking, color balancing, and tiling are the associated activities once the generalized orthorectified output images were generated. Quality assessment will be majorly done through visual inspection of the images. Major checks on the orthorectified images include spatial resolution, edge matching, double feature checking, tonal balance, and pixel dropouts.

SBL’s Geospatial wing recently won a project from Canada for the delineation of Land cover in Northwest Territory. This is again a reaffirmation of the varied skills of the Geospatial team wherein our pool of experts were able to provide a better solution to the forest department based on our quality of interpretation of the sample data and competitive pricing.

Land cover basically refers to the interpretation of land features that are visible on the surface of the earth. It does not cover the land usage which comes under Land use.

Land cover classificationincludes land features like trees, water bodies, bare earth and rock outcrops. In the present study our task was to interpret Land cover in forested regions of Northwest Territories, Canada. The input image provided by the client was mono satellite image and each image covered an area of 4 sq.km.

SBL’s experienced interpreters delineated the treed and non treed areas and created polygons out of it. The client had specified a minimum area for forest polygons and the area specified was 4 hectare and for non forested area polygon it was 0.5 hectare. The classification was done based on the tone and texture of the features(Fig.1).

The tree heights, texture and tree density were taken into account for the delineation. Trees situated in the high land regions will have a different tone, texture, height and density with respect to the trees in the high land and mid land regions(Fig.2, Fig.3).

Various tree species occurring in the forest areas display unique textural and tonal characteristics which were used as guide for the interpretation.

The water bodies consisted of rivers, major streams and also the closed water bodies like lakes which fall within the area stipulation of 0.5 hectares were also captured (Fig.4).

Rivers were captured at the edge of water and flood plains were delineated wherever the width is greater than 20m. The digitization was to be done in a scale level of 1:2000 and 1:2500 and the final output was viewed in a scale of 1:10000 in order to find out any dangle polygons, large polygon and also to merge adjacent polygons if necessary. The entire digitization was carried out in ArcGIS environment and the final output was delivered as shape files to the client.